First question – Do I have to worry about those things that have a status of “Running” on the “Services” tab of Windows Task Manager using up memory, if they aren’t also listed under the “Processes” tab? Somehow I was under the impression that the ongoing “Processes” were the only things I had to worry about.
2nd question – why is it that when I open Chrome (one window with only one tab open), 4 different processes start that add up to nearly 100K of memory? Only two processes start for IE explorer, but one of them is so large that the two almost add up to the Chrome total. Can I close any of them?
These are the names of the “Processes” running when no user programs (except Windows itself) are running:
csrss.exe
dwm.exe
explorer.exe (think I know the answer to this one)]
taskeng.exe
winlogon.exe
There is a very long list of programs under the “Services” tab, both “Running” and “Stopped”. I’ll list those depending on the answer to the first question.
I think all those are normal; is there any compelling reason why you’re trying to stop system processes?
For the browsers: it’s become increasingly common to run each browser window or tab in it’s own process (and in Chrome’s case, still more processes for the renderer and any plugins present). This is basically for security and recoverability. It’s hard to compromise the whole browser if you’re running isolated, and at the same time a crash in any component (usually plugins) won’t bring down the browser, and allows the browser to re-start it.
It’s almost never worth nickle-and-diming individual processes like this. If your system is resource starved, you’ll fight a never-ending battle trying to keep it froim starvation, and give yourself instability to boot. Better to just toss a larger stick of RAM in there.
My little Task Manager chart was showing 20 - 50% of memory in use with nothing no program windows at all opened (except Task Manager). And my computer is pretty new, and has a 2.4 gig processor and 6 gigs of RAM.
Up to 50% of 6 GB with nothing running? Are you sure that is actual memory being used (not including cached, as Windows tries to minimize memory that isn’t used for any reason). Right now my computer is using only 37% of 2 GB (only 148 MB is shown as “free” but 37% is the actual usage with the rest used as cache), including Firefox and 11 other processes (although it says 35 at the bottom, presumably counting multiple threads); I have rarely seen it above 50% even with more tabs open and other programs running (granted, I don’t do anything very memory intensive, say 500 MB max for one program, even the times when I needed more there was still 10-20% free memory left and no slowdowns). Same for CPU usage, which should always be near 0% when nothing is running, since some people think it is normal to see 10-20% or whatever when idle; FWIW, CPU speed has nothing to do with memory usage (just saying because you note your CPU speed as if it is relevant to memory usage).
“CPU Usage” is hopping between 25-50% with nothing opened. What is it churning away at?
“Physical Memory Usage” shows total of 6051, cached 3310, available 4251, free 993. How do they add up to more than the total?
Ok, some programs have at times asked me to increase my cache size, which I agreed to without paying much attention. How can I find out whether this is a realistic size or overkill?
Also, back to the first question – Do I have to worry about those things that have a status of “Running” on the “Services” tab of Windows Task Manager using up memory, if they aren’t also listed under the “Processes” tab?
It sounds like you are looking at the “Performance” tab in Task Manager. The data displayed there can be difficult to interpret, for a variety of reasons.
If you are simply worried about some ordinary program you’ve installed hogging your CPU and/or memory, it is a lot simpler to just use the “Processes” tab.
In the Processes tab, you can sort by CPU usage or by Memory just by clicking the appropriate column header (you may have to click twice to have it sort in descending order).
What processes are using the most CPU, and the most memory, on your system?
What programs? The answer will be different for each program and what you’re doing with it, there is no standard. In fact, a program prompting you with questions like that is fairly unusual.
Yes. Clicking the “Show Processes from All Users” will cause it to display all, or almost all, of the services listed as “Running” in in the “Processes” list.
Those are simply the processes that are running. What is their CPU usage, and memory usage? There are probably tons of things running that are idle (00 or 01 in the CPU column), and using just a few megabytes of memory, like dwm.
I will add that this is pretty much a pointless exercise, unless you are having an actual problem. Modern memory management architectures are very aggressive and are designed to use as much memory as possible to cache things so that they don’t need to be retrieved from the slow hard drive. You paid for 6 GB of RAM, don’t be perturbed that Windows is actually trying to use as much of it as possible even with a minimal workload. If you load something memory intensive, Windows will make room for it, even if the number it reports for “Free Memory” is quite low.
It should show the CPU usage under the processes tab; if not, click View on the menu and “select columns” in the submenu; “CPU Usage” is the fourth item from the top. Although I have found that I had to go to the performance tab and click on the “Resource Monitor” button to actually see which process was taking up CPU or memory (as I said, Task manger lists only 12 processes but shows 35 at the bottom).
“Available” memory includes cached and free memory; that is, memory that can be used by programs if they need it, Windows will just shrink the cache size if it needs more memory.
No idea about this (never seen it myself), and it doesn’t make much sense since they should be asking about memory, not cache (cached memory isn’t usable by programs until Windows frees it, which it will do if you need more memory, the size is thus dynamic and will take up as much of the “real” free memory as possible; any memory listed as “free” is useless as far as Windows is concerned).
If you are using a Windows machine, there are three free MS utilities that may help:
[ol]
[li]Autoruns - See what programs are configured to startup automatically when your system boots and you login. Autoruns also shows you the full list of Registry and file locations where applications can configure auto-start settings.[/li][li]Process Explorer - Find out what files, registry keys and other objects processes have open, which DLLs they have loaded, and more. This uniquely powerful utility will even show you who owns each process.[/li][li]Process Monitor - Monitor file system, Registry, process, thread and DLL activity in real-time.[/li][/ol]
Be really, really careful when using these utilities. You have an option to kill/delete a process/program. You can inadvertently do something that will forece you to reinstall Windows if you mess up.
I see there are 10 copies of a single file running, “svchost.exe”; 4 by username “Local Service”, 3 by username “Service” (one of which takes up 143,000 k of “private working set” memory), 3 by username “Network Service”. All together they take up more than 200,000 k of memory. Oddly, none list me as a user.
There are two copies of the file “csrss.exe” running.
Also, there seem to be some services listed as “running” that do not appear on the “processes” list. But one list has a file name and the other doesn’t, so it’s hard to say.
For each instance of “svchost”, you can right-click on it and select “Go to Service”. This will switch to the services tab and show you the corresponding service(s).
The one taking up 143 MB is most likely the Windows desktop / window manager. Not much you can do about that.
The other ones are almost certainly other Windows system services.
Sometime multiple services listed as running in “Services” correspond to the same “svchost.exe” process. That should account for any discrepancy between the two tabs.
Csrss is another window system service. Not sure if it is normal to have two of them. But again, it’s probably fine.
Once again: there is nothing wrong with your computer. Unless you have a specific, actual problem, this is all a waste of your time. Nothing you’ve mentioned in this thread is an actual problem. These are all normal Windows processes that will not be advantageous to disable.
EDIT: As long as you have an active, up-to-date anti-virus program. If not, yeah, you could probably stumble upon a virus while digging through all this. But many modern viruses are designed to not use much memory, specifically so as not to draw much attention.
The reason I started looking for problems is that Microsoft told me I had problems. I should have recognized it as bullshit – I did a pit thread about their “support” around the same time I started this one.
What’s to stop some malware using the same executable name as a legitimate process? So you’d see something called, say, csrss.exe, look it up on one of those websites, and wrongly conclude that it was legit.
Last time I looked into this sort of thing, which I admit was a good while ago, there was nothing to prevent that, but maybe things have moved on.